Americas

The gut-wrenching statistics on the poverty, foreclosures,
incarceration, unemployment, and stunted graduation rates deluging black
and brown communities cannot begin to illustrate just how little things
have changed under Obama.

But most revealing of the administration’s de-prioritization of racial
justice has been its diffident passivity toward reforming the criminal
justice system, the most sinister appendage of a new Jim Crow [popular
name for laws that gave the legal basis for racial segregation between
1876 and 1965]. Black people, Latinos and other minorities are
disenfranchised, dehumanized, and dumped into overflowing prisons under
the pretext of making communities “safer.”

But safer for whom? Evidently not people of color. Recently, for
example, a black woman by the name of Marissa Alexander was sentenced to
20 years for firing a warning shot at a wall in fear of her abusive
husband, while an overzealous vigilante walked free after murdering
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen.

In the age of Obama, we are witnessing the decimation of a generation.
Black Americans are incarcerated at rates nearly six times more than
whites. Blacks and Latinos, who account for a quarter of the general
population, make up 58% of the prison population. Black Americans are
only 12% of drug users, yet are 38% of those arrested and 58% of those
incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses. The government spends
$70 billion per year on corrections, while schools are collapsing and
jobs have disappeared from communities of color (NAACP.org).

War on Drugs or War on Black America?

Racial disparities in the justice system are most overt in drug
legislation, such as cocaine sentencing. Poor black Americans tend to
buy cheaper crack cocaine, for which possession of trace amounts results
in a five- or ten-year mandatory minimum, a sentence 100 times greater
than for the powdered cocaine more often used by whites. Under the 100:1
ratio, black Americans served similar prison sentences for non-violent
drug crimes as white Americans did for violent crimes (aclu.org). Nearly
half the Congressional Black Caucus found it justifiable to support this
drug law in 1986, (Black Agenda Report, 8/7/13). Today, 15% of federal
inmates are crack cocaine offenders, over 80% of whom are black, (Slate,
7/29/13).

Problems still exist in the flabby solutions forwarded by both political
parties. The bipartisan Fair Sentencing Act passed by Congress in 2010
reduced the cocaine sentencing disparity to an 18:1 ratio. But since
crack and powder cocaine are the same drug, the only racially unbiased
sentencing ratio would be 1:1. Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent
ultimatum also grants reprieve from mandatory minimums for low-level
drug offenders, as long as they can prove no significant criminal
history or association with a gang or cartel. Again, it’s a step
forward, but not without inflexible stipulations, nor is it a law that
is binding upon subsequent administrations.

Obama hasn’t taken any political risks to advance these attempts at
solutions. Every year, he pleads for more funding for federal prisons.
He hasn’t even endorsed the End Racial Profiling Act, a no-brainer for
our first black president. And he has the audacity to speak about
“fatherhood” and “responsibility” in front of black audiences, while
enabling the very policies that lock up the fathers of 1 out of every 15
black children and crucify these men with criminal records, ensuring
their perpetual unemployment and poverty, (sentencing.typepad.com, 1
December 2012).

It took the slaughter of a black teen, the acquittal of his murderer,
and protests across dozens of cities before Obama broke his long silence
about race with some heart-warming remarks, but still no deed. Cornel
West decried, “Five years in office and can’t say a word about a new Jim
Crow,” (Democracy Now, 22 July 2013).

The Democrats Get Three Strikes

To be clear, Obama is a powerful figurehead for a party that receives
96% of black support, and yet is out of touch with ordinary black
people. During the Reagan era, it was the majority Democrats in Congress
who really led the War on Drugs to vaingloriously prove to Republicans
that they were tough on crime.

And it was Democratic Mayor Michael Bloomberg who oversaw New York
City’s heinous “Stop and Frisk” policy. Even after a federal judge ruled
the practice racially discriminatory and unlawful, Bloomberg continues
to speak in support of Stop and Frisk, appealed the ruling, and accused
the judge of not understanding policing (ABC News, 12 August 2013).
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the other man behind stop-and-frisk, has
been publically adorned with Obama’s praises and could be appointed
Secretary of Homeland Security unless we raise hell on the streets.

A Generation Sheds Its Extra Baggage

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report explains that the campaign to
criminalize and terrorize black and brown people has been so successful
“precisely because there is no such [black mass movement] – that the
forces of white supremacy have been emboldened by Black passivity,”
(Black Agenda Report, 7 August 2013). He encourages challenges to
specific policies like “Stand Your Ground” and Stop and Frisk as just
one fragment of a wholesale confrontation against the entire
illegitimate criminal justice system.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement urges the black community to
proactively defend itself with a civil rights movement reborn: “We must
end our reliance on the model of protest mobilizations that occur after
the police have executed one of our loved ones. This must cease being
our primary means of securing justice,” (mxgm.org, July 2012).

No matter the president’s skin tone, people of color and their allies
must shed their loyalty to the Democratic Party and instead place
confidence in their own dynamic organization and mobilization within
their unions, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. We have been
unequivocally shown that a party with a black President, a black
attorney general, and a Congressional Black Caucus can still preserve
policies of black oppression for the benefit of a mainly-white elite. In
this criminal injustice system where people of color suffer the fiercest
blows, we must end our fearful refusal to censure Obama and the whole
establishment for unapologetically failing a whole generation of black
and brown people.